Ancestry Magazine

The unspeakable happens: a flood, fire, or other disaster strikes your home, and all of the family history records you gathered over the years are destroyed. Fortunately, you’re prepared, right? You made a backup copy of the data and stored it at a friend’s house.

But once you start your research again, you wonder why you came to certain conclusions. You can’t go back to your files; they’re gone, remember? All you have is the data in your genealogy program.

So how do you find the original sources? Via your documentation.

Documentation, similar to source citations and footnotes you used in school, is the trail of breadcrumbs that leads you back to the records you examined in order to arrive at specific conclusions—who married whom, when he died, which Mary was his sister, which was his aunt. Odds are good that you’ll need that trail long before disaster hits (unless you classify a question from a cousin about a fact on the family tree as a disaster). With documentation, you can look at your family history data and know right where that fact originated.

To be useful, your documentation needs to be thorough—“marriage record” or “obituary” simply isn’t enough. Was it the marriage record from the courthouse or the church? Whose obituary held the information? Exactly when and where was it published?

Useful documentation should be as inclusive as possible, complete with identifying information like the name of the author (or editor) and an e-mail address and other contact information if the source was electronic correspondence.

If the source was a book, you’ll need a title from the title page, not from the cover or spine. A spine may say only Clinton County, Iowa Deaths; use it in your documentation and you may confuse the source with death records at the Clinton County courthouse. If the citation includes the full title—Clinton County, Iowa Deaths: Pape Funeral Home Index, 1923–1999—you’ll know to look for a published book of funeral home records.

Additionally, you’ll want to include publishing details, which, at times, may be the only distinguishing details between two county histories with the same title and no listed author. Year of publication is also important—a county history published in 1883 may offer more details about a family living at that time than a history published in the late twentieth century. Edition and revision information is also vital.

Recently I used a collection of personal sketches from a Grand Army of the Republic post in Indianapolis. In my documentation, I chose to include the repository—the Indiana Historical Society in Indianapolis. You typically don’t include the repository when citing a book or document, but original records are usually one-of-a-kind and they can be very hard to find. Including the repository is one more crumb you can follow back to your original trail. So for me, when a family member or I want to find those personal sketches again, we’ll know where to look.

Thorough documentation doesn’t need to be difficult. It just takes a little time to ensure you get all of the details. Consider those minutes spent jotting down names, titles, dates, editions, and locations a wise investment—you never know when you’ll need to follow those breadcrumbs again.

Amy Johnson Crow, CG, is an author, editor, and lecturer, the creator of DeafBiograhies.com, and co-author of Online Roots. She can be reached at amy@amyjohnsoncrow.com.